Trash Mountain. Bradley Bazzle
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the next few days I biked to the grocery store after school and made study of parking lot dynamics. The thing that gave people the most trouble wasn’t carrying their groceries; it was returning their carts. They seemed to hate pushing their carts all the way back to the brick wall where the carts were lined up. Some people just left their carts. Others looked from side to side like they were thinking about maybe leaving their carts, but then they grudgingly pushed them back. These people were my target customer, I decided, and I made a few bucks by popping out during their moments of indecision and offering to return their carts for a small fee. I left the fee vague in case they wanted to give me more than a dollar. Sometimes they gave me a quarter, though. One time a guy in a sleeveless denim vest ignored me, left the cart where it was, and backed into it intentionally. It’s surprising what some people do.
At the Salvation Army Family Store I bought a little green vest that almost matched the vests the grocery store people wore. It even had a nametag like theirs did, but the name said Roger Talamantez, so when old people leaned close to get a look at my name I had to lie and say my name was Roger. And once I lied, I kept lying. That was something I discovered about myself. After I said my name was Roger, I might say I lived in a trailer down by the river with my older brother’s widow and their three kids, whom I was helping to raise, or that I was much older than I looked because of a pituitary gland disease. I might say I was in training to be a checkout person, the youngest ever, but had to cut my teeth the old fashioned way, “out on the blacktop,” which was grocery store lingo for the parking lot.
The lying made it fun, and almost made up for the times people blew me off or didn’t pay me or damn near backed over me with their jacked-up trucks. The worst was when old ladies decided I was “playing dress up” and was “just the cutest little thing.” That bothered me because I was playing dress up, kind of, but I didn’t like to think of it that way. For me it was serious. I had started to think that if you dressed and behaved like a person, you could become that person.
I made about two dollars an hour so in two weeks I had almost thirty dollars in singles. I kept the singles in a shoebox under my bed. It didn’t occur to me to spend any of it until one day I made thirteen whole dollars because an old man in a tracksuit gave me a ten, maybe by accident. On the way home I wondered if I should treat myself to something. The Red Dragon 400,000 BTU Backpack Torch Kit with Squeeze Valve still loomed large in my mind, but I’d have enough for it in a few months either way, and in the meantime I might keep up my gumption with something smaller.
I thought about stuff I liked but didn’t get enough of, in my estimation, and decided milkshakes were near the top of the list. But the drugstore downtown that used to sell milkshakes was closed, and the only other place I could think of, Yummy Pizza Taco, had a weird smell that made the milkshakes taste worse. I decided that candy bars, though a distant second, might make me feel at least some sense of accomplishment, so I stopped in the Drug Time drugstore and bought a Twix. I ate one bar on the way home, then at home I sat on my bed and wondered if I should eat the other Twix bar or save it. Finally I took the bar to Ruthanne’s room and asked if she wanted it. She offered to split it with me, so we sat there on her bed crunching the second Twix bar.
I asked her what book she was reading and she said it was none of my business, but then she felt bad and told me the book was about some gang guys in Oklahoma who got in rumbles but secretly cried all the time and loved each other. I wanted to know more about the rumbles, but she changed the subject. She said, “You know, Ben, if you bought candy like this for a different girl, she might let you touch her boobs.”
“Shows what you know,” I said. I had a notion from Dad that you had to buy a woman at least twenty dollars worth of food before she’d even kiss you, not that I cared about that stuff. I just wanted Ruthanne to allow that I might know a thing or two for myself and not have to be told everything by a smartass like her. I said, “Don’t tease me right now. My nerves are shot. A man coming home from work deserves a little respect.”
She threw a pillow at my head. “You just hung around a grocery store parking lot for an hour. You call that work?”
“What would you call it?”
She shrugged. “I guess I’d call it work too. You know, Ben, I didn’t think you’d land a powerbroker-type job like this, but you sure proved me wrong. Pretty soon you’ll be CEO of a Fortune 500 company.”
“Probably.”
From then on I made a point of buying a candy bar at the end of the week for Ruthanne and me to share. It felt good to go into the Drug Time with money in my pocket. But in November I realized it would be cheaper to buy discounted Halloween candy at the grocery store, as long as I had the discipline not to eat it all at once. So I bought a bag of fun-sized Twix and kept them in my closet, and every Saturday I pulled out two and brought them into Ruthanne’s room. When the Twix ran out I bought Hershey’s Kisses, which she liked, but eventually the Hershey’s Kisses got this white stuff all over them, like mildew. I scraped it off but the inside part was hard and tasted like coffee.
The next time I bought candy, to replace the weird Hershey’s Kisses, I was standing in line at the Drug Time with a wad of singles in my pocket, listening to the horrible saxophone music they played in there, when I started wondering where was the adventure in making and spending money, especially if you had to spend it someplace like Drug Time or Yummy Pizza Taco or even Burger Brothers, though they had pretty decent burgers. I bought some fun-sized Payday bars, but the thought stuck with me.
That night, after stuffing the rest of the singles into my shoebox, I took out The Highest Mountain again. In the part I was on, Bob Bilger was talking about how the Army made him a man. Before the Army, he said, he had been “steadily transforming into a low-rent flimflam man: picking pockets, prying open payphones with a screwdriver, running errands for men my father detested, men who sat in folding chairs all afternoon circling racehorses in the dailies, circulating cash-filled envelopes among themselves, eating sandwiches of truly disquieting girth.” His distaste for running errands made sense to me, but the only reason he could stop, it seemed to me, was because he joined the Army, and I was too young to join the Army. Plus the Army seemed pretty boring, what with cleaning latrines and marching until you puked. I skipped ahead until I saw the word “Vietnam,” but there was marching in that part too. So much marching! No wonder Bob Bilger’s legs got strong enough to climb a mountain.
I closed the book and turned off the lamp to go to sleep. The view through my bedroom window wasn’t as good as Ruthanne’s, but lying there in the dark I could see a dim glow from the side of Trash Mountain. The glow was from rotting wood, I had learned, but in my heart I considered the glow to be a sign of Trash Mountain’s mystical nonhuman power. The glow made me wonder if money and jobs and even school were just tricks to distract me from my secret hidden purpose, which was to destroy Trash Mountain. And maybe, I thought, destroying Trash Mountain was just the first step in what would become a life of adventure.
I couldn’t fall asleep so I snuck out on Ruthanne’s bike, which I had begun to pay her for in installments of five dollars a month, since Ruthanne’s bike was superior to my own in every respect except its lavender color and lady’s crossbar.
I headed downtown, where the streets were mostly empty. The city didn’t light the street lamps anymore so the only light was the light of the moon, which was full that night, lucky for me, and free from the haze that sometimes made it look like it was shining behind toilet paper. Downtown looked empty, but sometimes old cars came out of alleys so fast that you almost got hit. Sometimes hobos yelled unseen from the pitch black doorways where they made their homes. None of that stuff happened, though, so to make it more exciting I played a game in my head where the cops were chasing me and I had to pedal as fast as I could and be ready to execute escape maneuvers such as hopping the curb or doing a flying wheelie through a plate-glass storefront.
BY THE TIME high-school started I had $726, mostly in singles, which fit in a shoebox after I flattened the crinkled bills inside my copy of The Highest Mountain. It was more than enough to buy